Daily Archives: May 29, 2004

Stros’ buzzard’s luck

Posted on by
Reply

The Stros lost their seventh game in the last nine on Saturday afternoon as the Cards scored six runs in the last two innings in their 10-3 victory. Albert Pujols went nuclear on the Stros, going 4 for 5 with two mammoth yaks, a double, and three RBIs.
The game was close until the eighth when things really got out of hand. Jeff Kent went after a foul pop-up from Ray Lankford that appeared to richocet into fair territory (and unfortunately away from Kent) off of one of the Juice Box‘s roof beams. Under Minute Maid Park ground rules, the ball should have been declared a foul ball, but the umpiring staff blew the call, just as they blew the balk call against Dotel the previous game. The flustered Kent overthrew third base on the play, allowing another run to score, and a Vizcaino throwing error on the next batter allowed two more runs to score. After that chaotic interlude, the Stros were toast.
Tim Redding takes the mound tomorrow in the Sunday afternoon game to try and salvage one for the Stros in this series. Ace Matt Morris goes for the Redbirds.

Another milestone for Bags

Posted on by
Reply

Stros first baseman and future Hall of Famer Jeff Bagwell played in his 2000th career game last night.
Bags has been good for so long that it is easy to take him for granted. Although he is clearly in the autumn of his career (this will likely be his fifth straight season of declining offensive numbers), Bags in decline is still better than most players.
A team wins baseball games by scoring more runs than the other team. So, the amount of runs that a player creates is the best indication of a player’s hitting ability. In that connection, sabermetricians who have studied hitting statistics over generations have concluded that two particular hitting statistics are the best indicators of how many runs that a player will create — on base average (“OBA”) and slugging percentage (“SLG”). This makes sense because players who get on base frequently (OBA) and who hit the ball hard (SLG) tend to create the most runs. OBA and SLG are combined into a cumulative statistic called “OPS,” which is OBA + SLG = OPS.
Building on these statistics, Lee Sinins, a lawyer turned sabermetrician, has developed another statistic called “runs created against average” (“RCAA”) in connection with his website Baseball Immortals and his related Baseball Sabermetric Encyclopedia, which is an excellent baseball statistical database than can be purchased through Lee’s site.
RCAA is a particularly valuable statistic to evaluate hitting because it focuses on the two most important things in winning baseball games ? that is, creating runs and avoiding making outs. RCAA basically computes the number of outs that a particular player uses in creating runs for his team and then compares that number to the amount of runs that an average player in the league would create while using an equivalent number of outs.
RCAA is computed by taking a specific player’s runs created (“RC”) statistic minus the amount of runs created that an average player would have created using the same amount of his team’s outs based on the league average and adjusted to the player’s home park. The hypothetical average hitter in the league has an RCAA of exactly zero. Thus, a player can have either a positive RCAA — which indicates he is an above average hitter — or a negative RCAA, which means he is performing below average.
For example, as you might expect, Barry Bonds led the NL and MLB last season with a positive 115 RCAA ? that is, he produced an incredible 115 more runs for the Giants than an average NL player would have created using an equivalent number of his team’s outs. On the other side of the ledger, the Stros’ Brad Ausmus was one of the five worst hitters in the NL last season, producing a horrid negative 32 RCAA, which means that he created 32 fewer runs than an average player would have created using an equivalent number of his team’s outs.
In acknowledging Bags’ milestone of playing in his 2000th game, Sinins noted the following:

After 43 RCAA/.966 OPS and 38 RCAA/.919 OPS seasons, Bagwell hit .524 SLG,
.373 OBA, .897 OPS, 21 RCAA in 160 games in 2003 and is off to a .465 SLG,
.411 OBA, .876 OPS, 9 RCAA start in his first 45 games. He has a .957
career OPS, compared to his league average of .762, and 672 RCAA in 2000 games.
Bagwell ranks 8th on the NL’s career RCAA list (since 1900)–
RCAA
1 Barry Bonds 1385
2 Stan Musial 1204
3 Rogers Hornsby 1081
4 Hank Aaron 1039
5 Willie Mays 1008
6 Mel Ott 989
7 Honus Wagner 938
8 Jeff Bagwell 672
9 Joe Morgan 657
10 Eddie Mathews 652

That’s pretty good company for Bags, who is simply the best Stros player ever.

Daniel Drezner on the Iraq War plan

Posted on by
Reply

In this New Republic ($) Online article, Daniel Drezner does a good job of concisely analyzing the Iraq War plan and the execution of its goal. The entire article is well worth reading, and the following is a tidbit to pique your interest:

Say what you will about the neoconservatives’ skills at manners or management; their big idea cannot be dismissed lightly. There is a compelling logic to the argument that the primary source of frustration among Arabs in the Middle East is a sense of powerlessness. Trapped in a region littered with authoritarian and corrupt regimes, they are encouraged by these regimes and their Islamic critics to blame their situation on Israel and the United States. This is an ideal environment for fomenting terrorism. Creating an open society in Iraq would put the lie to this kind of hate-mongering.
To be sure, democracy promotion is far from easy. Indeed, regime change in the Middle East looks like a lousy, rotten policy option for addressing the root causes of terrorism, until one considers the alternatives–appeasement or muddling through. The latter option was essentially the pre-9/11 position of the United States and its allies, and has been found wanting. Appeasement or isolation has the same benefits and costs that the strategy had in the 1930s: It buys short-term solace but raises the long-term costs of facing a stronger and potentially undeterrable adversary.
For all their criticism of Bush’s grand strategy, Europeans and left-wingers have offered very little in the way of alternatives to his vision. Some say that American soft power could bring about change in the Middle East. But decades of alternately coddling, cajoling, and ostracizing Arab despots has not led to liberalization or democratization. We have showered Egypt with aid, but have succeeded only in propping up an authoritarian monster in Hosni Mubarak. We have tried to isolate Syria, but have only strengthened that country’s anti-American credentials. Maybe U.S. soft power is part of the solution to the Middle East’s woes, but soft power alone cannot accomplish our desired ends.
The craft of foreign policy is choosing wisely from a set of imperfect options. While flawed, the neoconservative plan of democracy promotion in the Middle East remains preferable to any known alternatives.

VDH quotes Al Davis

Posted on by
Reply

Victor Davis Hanson quoting Oakland Raiders‘ owner Al Davis? Read about it here. One of Professor Hanson’s typically insightful observations is the following:

If one goes back to the fifth week of Bill Clinton’s 79-day bombing campaign against Serbia ? no U.N. approval, no congressional sanction, NATO partners backing out ? one reads of castigation from the American Right about bombing a Christian Orthodox country in Europe, from neoconservatives about not committing ground troops, and from the Left about going to war at all. But with Milosevic in the dock and the mass murder stopped, we now are told that the Clinton administration’s efforts to stop the bloodbath in the Balkans proved to be about the only success of his scandal-ridden administration. Why? He persevered and won ? and we can imagine what would have happened had he caved in at week six and called it another Mogadishu.
The truth is that for all our education, nuance, and professed idealism, too many of us think and act with our limbic systems, which are hard-wired to appreciate perceived success and feel comfortable with consensus. Like most in the animal kingdom, man wishes to identify with good fortune and abhors apparent failure, and thus seeks conveniently to find distance from it. After Abu Graib and the insurrections in Fallujah and Najef, the loudmouth critic Michael Moore is praised as a gifted filmmaker at the Cannes Film Festival even as prominent conservatives and ex-generals, now in their newfound genius, trash the war and claim they were brainwashed, naÔve, or not listened to.
Our leaders should remember this volatility. In the long run, of course, the present strategy is sound and in a decade will be judged as such by historians. How could it not be sound to remove a mass murderer who posed a threat to the region and our country and then sponsor a consensual government in his place?

Listening Al Gore?